Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
“The newest models of the Fire TV 4-Series and Fire TV Omni QLED Series now feature the Xbox app built right in, with additional models coming in the future,” according to Amazon.
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The arrival of generative AI assistants in our smart homes held such promise; instead, they struggle to turn on the lights.
Amazon’s next-gen voice assistant has been rolling out slowly but surely, shipping on new Echo devices, and hitting the web for some users. Now Prime members with older Echoes can get Alexa Plus by saying “Alexa, upgrade.” The only question is, is it really an upgrade?
Amazon’s AI-powered assistant can use visual context from Ring doorbells to identify visitors, interpret why they’re there, and interact “intelligently” using natural language, according to the company. The feature, first announced in September, launches today and will work with the Ring Video Doorbell Pro (3rd Gen) and the Ring Video Doorbell Plus (2nd Gen) and requires a Ring subscription.
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Boy, the creative choices here for the Melania doc... They feel familiar somehow. Even, and maybe especially, the music.
Details are uncertain but reports suggest talks are definitely underway. It could see OpenAI using Amazon’s Trainium chips and selling an enterprise version of ChatGPT. OpenAI inked a $38 billion AI training deal with AWS last month.
Amazon happens to be a major investor in OpenAI’s rival Anthropic.
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This is a great device for a certain kind of notetaker. Otherwise, a regular e-reader or tablet will do.
Bloomberg reports the Luxembourg office will fire 370 employees, around 8.5 percent of the 4,370 staff. Amazon announced 14,000 global layoffs in October.
The tiny European tax haven only has a population of 680,000, and these are its biggest layoffs in two decades — but still leave Amazon the fifth largest employer in the country.
Ubisoft has acquired March of Giants, a free-to-play MOBA that was previously developed by Amazon’s Montreal studio. Amazon’s VP of games positively mentioned March of Giants in an October memo announcing the company’s pivot away from MMOs, but Amazon is moving on from the game anyway.
Free, ad-supported streamer Tubi is now compatible with Matter Casting, making it the first app other than Prime Video to adopt the standard, which is currently only available on Amazon Fire TV devices.
Will you use it? Maybe not, but at least it’s an option, unlike Netflix.
[TubiTV Corporate]
MCP has already taken the industry by storm, and now Anthropic is giving it away.
The feature uses AI to give you more detailed motion notifications, like describing people the camera or doorbell detects, much like the AI video descriptions Ring cameras got earlier this year.
Video descriptions are launching as an early access beta feature and require a paid Blink subscription.
It was bad enough that Amazon thought people would enjoy English / Spanish versions of Banana Fish and No Game, No Life Zero that were shoddily dubbed using generative AI. But Anime News Network reports that the streamer didn’t even bother to ask the original studios behind those series if that kind of dubbing was ok.
Amazon’s continued focus on offering AI agents through AWS now includes Reinforcement Fine Tuning of AI models built on Amazon’s Nova 2 Lite in Bedrock. The company also announced new “serverless” model customization with SageMaker AI that can provide compute based on the model size with Amazon’s own Nova, OpenAI’s GPT-OSS, Meta’s Llama, and others.
Amazon’s newest server packs up to 144 of the company’s custom-built Trainium3 chips, able to output 4.4 times more compute than the second generation, with 4x the efficiency and almost 4x the memory bandwidth of its second-generation server.
This chip follows the new 7th-generation “Ironwood” AI chip from Google and Nvidia’s recently introduced Blackwell Ultra.
The service is back with another yearly recap, and this time, it will create a personalized festival poster based on your most-played artists, tracks, and genres, while displaying other insights. You can find your recap by opening the Amazon Music app, tapping Library, and selecting “2025 Delivered.”
Following two Amazon drone crashes in Arizona last month, the FAA is investigating another incident in Waco, Texas, according to CNBC. After delivering a package the drone “got tangled in a nearby internet cable” before shearing the wire and performing a “safe contingent landing.” There were no injuries or widespread internet outages.
The infrastructure buildout will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of capacity for AI and cost up to $50 billion, the company said. US government customers will have access to both AWS Trainium AI chips and NVIDIA chips, and Amazon said it plans to start building the data centers in 2026.
It’s the first international expansion of Amazon’s upgraded, AI-powered Alexa, which launched first in the US. Amazon plans to invite “tens of thousands of Canadians every week to enjoy the new experience,” according to a blog post.
